Procurve 2910al config for EqualLogic PS4000 1

[SteveHodd]

thread777-1558163

I am having problems configuring a Procurve 2910al switch for the iSCSI connection to a EqualLogic PS4000 SAN.
Both ports connected to the EqualLogic report:
Excessive jabbering/fragments
Excessive CRC/alignment errors

Both jumbo frames and flow control is enabled on the switch. spanning-tree is disabled.

EqualLogic support are unable to help, apart from suggesting enabling spanning-tree portfast, which I don't think you can do on the 2910?

thread777-1558163 suggests someone has been able to configure a procurve successfully. If anyone could post a valid switch configuration or has any other suggestions, I would be very grateful.

Thanks

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

Does "show log" offer any additional clues?

 

[SteveHodd]

show log is just showing the same errors, as I am seeing in the GUI, so no additional clues.

W 03/10/90 05:22:14 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 07:22:17 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 07:52:23 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 08:52:14 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:28:50 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:29:11 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:30:03 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:30:24 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:30:56 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:31:48 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:32:30 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:33:02 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:33:54 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:34:15 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:35:39 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:37:03 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:39:30 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:40:02 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:43:42 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:44:14 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:46:09 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:47:12 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 10:47:23 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:53:09 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 10:57:32 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 11:18:11 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 11:52:18 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 12:52:20 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 15:22:18 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 16:22:20 00328 FFI: port 23-Excessive jabbering/fragments. See Help
W 03/10/90 16:22:20 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.
W 03/10/90 22:22:18 00329 FFI: port 23-Excessive CRC/alignment errors. See help.

 

[cajuntank]

Turn jumbo frames off on both switch and SAN, make sure flow control is turned on for both switch ports and SAN. Make sure your firmware code on your 2910al is W.14.65 (you'll have to call tech support for them to send to you as they have yet to post it to the public website).

See where things stand... if traffic mellows out, then you can try re-enabling jumbo frames. If jumbo frames still causes an issue, don't be too disheartend, after everything said and done, it would have only made a 3-5% performance increase for your average type of access. Jumbo frames adds a little additional troubleshooting complexity and you need to get it to a more simple config across the board. The firmware is a known issue and I too had traffic issues until got that internal release of code.

Report back to let us know if that helped.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

I've got 2910s running W.14.49 *without* Jumbo Frames and it works fine.
I've been trying to interest the server and storage guys in enabling Jumbo Frames across the board but they haven't bitten yet.
I'll be sure to remember W.14.65 (I checked the other day and it still wasn't posted then) if and when we get any issues.
Thanks for that tip, BTW Cajun, that's the second time I've seen you mention it.

 

[cajuntank]

I have these switches and HP's LeftHand SAN nodes and was getting a ton of retransmits beyond the norm. After some digging on the HP ITRC support forum, someone else was having this issue, called HP Procurve support and it's a known issue with that rev of code that's posted online. The engineer acknowledged the issue and was straight to send me an internal build that I applied and traffic levels were great thereafter. I'm just really surprised that they have not posted anything newer than the build they have up there now as this was several months ago.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

The build they have up there is dated 10 August 2010!

 

[SteveHodd]

Thanks guys for your replies.
I am currently running W.14.49 but will upgrade to W.14.65

I have tried turning off Jumbo frames before and still received errors, but I will try this again.

VinceWhirlwind: as you have this working with 2910's, I would be really intrested to see a copy of your switch config, incase there are any other settings I have missed (like spanning-tree), any chance that you could post a copy?

I'm away from the office, but I will post again when I have made the changes.

 

[SteveHodd]

Have made some progress.

I have made 2 changes:
Upgraded the firmware on the EqualLogic PS4000 from v5.0.7 to v5.0.8
On the Procurve 2910al moved the iSCSI ports from the defaultVLAN to a new VLAN (Dell suggested this)

Since these changes I have not seen any errors on the ports connected to the PS4000.

I have now installed firmware W.14.68 from HP support and I'm still not seeing any errors.

I will now increase the load on the PS4000 and continue to monitor the switch for errors. I will report back when I have more info.

spanning-tree is currently disabled on switch, Dell recommend it is enabled. I have not configured spanning-tree before. Dell recommend spanning-tree portfast which I think applies to Cisco routers. Can anyone give be details of the Procurve equivalent.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

When I started here, I discovered none of the switches had spanning-tree enabled, so I enabled it.

On this model switch, I just went into conf t and put in "spanning-tree".

I didn't worry about portfast and I haven't had any complaints.

There really isn't much to these configs.
I have the management VLAN set, an IP address on that VLAN interface, a default GW:
ip default-gateway 10.7.249.1
vlan 249
name "NET_ADMIN"
ip address 10.7.249.229 255.255.255.0
tagged A1-A2
exit
management-vlan 249

I have each VLAN created and then applied as either tagged or untagged to the relevant port, eg:
vlan 252
name "UNIX_ADMIN"
untagged 1,15-16
tagged 9,24-A2
no ip address
exit

Then I have logging, authentication, sntp, snmp.

And "spanning-tree".

That's it.

After I added "spanning-tree" I gave the switch redundant links. I don't have redundant power for it.

At some point I'm going to around all the switches here and add Root Guard and BPDU guard.

 

[SteveHodd]

I have enabled spanning-tree and the switch is still stable, so all is looking good.

I think that although I needed to make the changes to the switch, the biggest factor in stopping the errors was upgrading the firmware on the PS4000. I will now always monitor the switch closely following any firmware upgrades on the PS4000.

Thanks for your tips and advice with this, you have been a great help.